This past week I had the privilege of spending Thanksgiving week with some friends of mine on their family’s farm in Dushor, PA. This isn’t just any farm, either. It’s a Christmas tree farm! It was a great way to begin this season of so many holidays and celebrations.
Several of my more recent Thanksgivings have been spent watching people decorate their homes for Christmas in a neighborhood in Charlotte that is chocked full of blinking lights, six foot candy canes, inflatable grinches the size of minivans and a colossal half inflated Santa that never seems quite able to stand up straight and spends most of December in a half bow, bobbing up and down with the breeze.
One of my favorite holiday television commercials has returned this year: the crazy target lady! She always wears bright red and has a wild eyed zeal for Christmas discounts! She’s often screaming with joy at the super duper savings and Christmas joy. I think one of the reasons I like these commercials is that it sort of makes fun of all of us who scramble around frantically, desperate to buy Christmas Joy, make it all just PERFECT!!! To make it the MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR, DAMN IT!!
But this year was quite different from previous Thanksgiving weeks. For one thing, I learned a great deal about Christmas trees. There are many different kinds and this particular farm where I stayed had at least five different varieties, each with different characteristics that might make one better suited than another for your tastes. The most interesting one to me had a different smell when you snapped off a little twig. It smelled like oranges. It was a Con-Color Fir Tree. Some trees are bluer, some more silvery, some have short spikey needles and some have soft or long needles. Walking along the rows of trees in the quiet, cool, overcast November morning was a great deal more peaceful than the Target lady’s commercials or the genuflecting Santa. It was nice to have that calm moment, that peaceful spot to stand and look at God’s beautiful creation, beautiful even in the midst of drearily late fall, and breathe. Just take a breath and be still before the onrush of Christmas. In many ways, Advent is meant to be like that still, quiet mountainside. It is full of God’s good creation just waiting to be enjoyed, just waiting to be part of the celebration of the birth of the Son of God. If we can stop for a moment and see it, Advent is as beautiful and full of God’s still peace as that forest of trees.
There is also a different side to Advent as well. It is a time of peaceful waiting, but it is also a time of anxious waiting, too. A church commentator* recently wrote about our manic, panic driven need to make Christmas PERFECT, to make it THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR, and to get to Christmas AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! She said:
“Beneath our holiday cheer is the gnawing anxiety, the nostalgia, the strange spiritual hunger that this season inevitably uncovers. Which is why the alternative world of the church during this Advent season is so odd and so strangely comforting. With our hymns and deep [blues and] purple, with our apocalyptic scriptures….the church on this late November Sunday is strangely out of sync with the secular world.”
Indeed, she is correct and in this incongruity we are reminded of who we are called to be. We are reminded that as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are not to be conformed to this world but are to be transformed by the astounding good news of Jesus Christ. However, before we get that good news, before we see the baby in the manger, open the gifts on Christmas day, sing sing with the choirs of angels away in the manger on the silent and holy night, it seems that we must go through some bad news first.
The world is not how God intends for it to be. We know that by a simple reading of the paper or even a few minutes of watching the news. Sometimes, the broken parts of our lives and relationships with family and friends become all the more visible during the holidays. Pain, suffering, illness, loss, death.
The world, both the wide world we all share and our own intimate personal worlds, are not as they could be. That’s not just in a “how we OUGHT to live” because of what someone else tells us sort of way, but in a deeply instinctive way, we know that our lives are not all that they could be. We know that the world isn’t as we would have it to be. Regardless of our feelings about particular military conflicts in the world, we would probably all like to have our military home for Christmas. Conflict and struggles in our government and governments around the world as well as other economic struggles are frustrating at best, frightening at worst. We see the damaged caused by the many natural disasters we have seen this year and wish there were something we could do. Perhaps there is even a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that war and disaster could be a sign of the end. We wish the world were a better place and we may even feel helpless to do anything about it. That might be part of what drives us to try so hard to make Christmas PERFECT! Even if everything else is falling apart, Christmas should be WONDERFUL!
In listening to our gospel text for today, we can know that when we worry about these kinds of things, we are not alone. Jesus talks about the very same kinds of things we fear with his disciples. In fact, he says in other parts of the gospels that terrible times are a very real part of life. Destruction, war, political problems, suffering and persecution, natural disasters. Truth is, it would be easy to stop there. To stop with all the negative, to see all that hopelessness and to see nothing else.
But that is not what we hear in this text. That is not all we hear in Jesus’ words for us. For one thing, at no point in his ministry does Jesus say: I think it’s a good thing that bad stuff happens. Although he clearly understands that difficult struggles are a part of life, he also clearly does not mean that is the way God wants it to be. In fact, quite the opposite. He reassures us that it is at the times of our greatest suffering and confusion that we may have the greatest hope.
Jesus says—But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” This might be a little difficult for us to understand what he means here, but he is giving us encouragement. In other words, when you see these things take heart! Have courage! Do not be afraid! He does not try to minimize difficult things by saying any one of a thousand platitudes like—it’s not really so bad, look on the bright side or something like: when God does this, we know he has a plan. Jesus definitely knows there is a plan, but he also knows that the suffering and pain that humanity and all of creation experience is NOT part of that plan. Our salvation from it, from our sin, from the brokenness of this world IS part of that plan. Instead, he tells his disciples and us that God will move heaven and earth to save us.
In our OT lesson, the prophet Isaiah speaks about God coming to set things right. This is a difficult text and a strange one to hear right as we begin what is supposed to be a joyful season of celebration. Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down, Isaiah says, so that the mountains would quake at your presence! These are the words of a man who is all too familiar with life’s struggles. They could easily be the words of anyone who sees injustice in the world, sees the hungry and cold who suffer as we begin this winter season; sees the lonely and the lost who feel all the more isolated during the holidays. Come down, O God, and make it right because we no longer know what to do. The very last prayer in the bible at the end of the last chapter of the last book is this: Come, Lord Jesus. When we do not know what to pray, this can be our prayer. Come, Lord Jesus, for we do not know what to do. This was Isaiah’s prayer.
And the gospel text is, in a manner of speaking, Jesus’ answer. Hold on, I’m coming! Jesus also promises us all that although Heaven and earth may pass away, his words..his promises.. do not pass away. Nothing can stop him from fulfilling his promise. Nothing will ever be able to keep God from coming to us again to make all things new.
Ultimately, there isn’t anything wrong with Christmas decorations, Black Friday sales and even over the top blinking lights and inflatable santas. But the truth is that none of it is as important as what we are really waiting for. None of it is half as important as that quiet spiritual hunger inside us. As that moment to just breathe in the world as we long for something more than only pretty lights and sleigh bells. None of it truly satisfies or makes right the world, fulfills what the world longs for and needs.
While the rest of the world rushes forward for the instant feel good of gifts, decorations, and other quick fixes, we wait through the anticipation of Advent for our Lord’s return. Sure, we have our own share of paper, boxes, ribbons and bags, sugar plums, holly and trees with stars, but we know there is something more here, too. We are waiting on the fulfillment of that promise—the coming again of Jesus. As the baby in the manger and as the king in the clouds. Coming again to fulfill the promises God has made to us. Come, Lord Jesus, and make all things new.
* [The Rev. Dr. Susan Andrews]
November 26, 2011
shepherdesswrites
